Team develops highly flexible high-energy textile lithium battery for wearable electronics

Professor ZHENG Zijian, who leads the ITC

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research team, said, "Wearable technology has been named as the next global big market opportunity after smartphones. Global market revenues for wearable devices are forecast to grow by leaps and bounds, of over 20% annually, to reach US$100 billion by 2024. As all wearable electronics will require wearable energy supply, our novel technology in fabricating Textile Lithium Battery offers promising solution to a wide array of next-generation applications, ranging from healthcare, infotainment, sports, aerospace, fashion, IoT [Internet of Things] to any sensing or tracking uses that may even exceed our imagination of today."
Lithium battery is currently the dominant rechargeable battery in the market due to its relatively high energy density and long cycle life. As conventional bulky heavy lithium battery is hard for use in wearable devices, over the past decade, scientists have put in efforts in developing bendable lithium battery, often by using metal foils as current collectors. However, it is only until the emergence of PolyU's Textile Lithium Battery that the bottlenecks over energy density, flexibility, mechanical robustness and cycling stability being able to be addressed.Applying PolyU's patented novel technology of Polymer-Assisted Metal Deposition (PAMD), highly conductive metal, copper (Cu) and nickel (Ni) are uniformly and conformally deposited onto pre-treated fabrics. Such fabricated metallic fabrics, featuring low sheet resistance and large surface area , serve as current collectors in battery. After adding active materials to act as cathode and anode, the metallic fabrics, together with separator and electrolyte, are assembled into the Textile Lithium Battery.

https://phys.org/news/2019-05-team-highly-flexible-high-energy-textile.html